Tom Richardson is back again with another finger-twisting ‘Lick of the Week’. Every other Wednesday Tom will publish a new lick lesson in video format along with a brief description and tabs. These licks are aimed mainly at the intermediate and advanced level players, so get your game faces on!

If you have missed previous lessons then be sure to check out the ‘Lick of the Week‘ archives. Also make sure to subscribe to the LeftyFretz YouTube Channel to make sure you get your fortnightly fix of left handed guitar licks from Tom

Lick of the Week Lesson 28

This week’s lick shows how to add one note to the standard minor pentatonic scale to give it a Melodic Minor sound.

The standard Pentatonic scale consists of R b3 4 5 b7

Melodic Minor is R 2 b3 4 5 6 7

As you will see, all the notes of the Pentatonic are found in the Melodic Minor scale but the b7 is a natural 7 in the Melodic Minor scale. By playing the Pentatonic scale and targeting this one note will instantly give you a Melodic Minor tonality.

One way to think of this note is as a semitone below the root note. The lick is in A minor so the natural 7th note will be Ab, one fret down from the root note. Also this note works best as a passing note so don’t hold the note for too long unless you want to sound really outside!

The lick uses 8th notes for the rhythm and uses two common Pentatonic scale positions. The first natural 7th can be found in the second bar (6th fret of D string) and the lick ends with another natural 7th at the 4th fret of the E string.

Feedback

If you’re struggling to get this lick down then leave a question below and we’ll get back to you. If you manage to nail this lick then consider leaving a video response for us on YouTube. Also be sure to check out more of Tom’s playing on his YouTube channel

If you want to print the tab you can. Either right click and open the image in a new window/tab and print from there, or save the image to your computer and then print. If you have GuitarPro you can also download the GP5 file and print from within the software.